Page 173 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

162 MEDIA STUDIES

Nowell-Smith rightly points to the particularity of Neale’s approach, breaking,
as it does, with the ahistorical and unspecified use of the category of the subject.
In his summary of Neale’s position Nowell-Smith points out that ‘[propaganda]…
films require to be seen, politically, in terms of the positionality they provide for
19
the socially located spectator.’ This is ‘on the one hand, a question of textual
relations proper, of mode of address’, but it is also a question of ‘the politico-
historical conjuncture’, because ‘the binding of the spectator takes place’ (or, we
would add, fails to take place) ‘not through formal mechanisms alone but
through the way social instructions impose their effectivity at given moments
20
across the text and also elsewhere’. This argument has consequences for how
both ‘texts’ and ‘subjects’ are conceptualized. It gives the level of the discursive
its proper specificity and effectivity; but it does not treat the text as
autonomously signifying, nor does it accord signification an all-inclusive effect.
It qualifies what can be meant by the term ‘the productivity of the text’. As
Gledhill has recently observed, at a more general level:

Under the insistence of the semiotic production of meaning, the effectivity
of social, economic and political practice threatens to disappear altogether.
There is a danger of conflating the social structure of reality with its
signification, by virtue of the fact that social processes and relations have
to be mediated through language, and the evidence that the mediating
power of language reflects back on the social process. But to say that
language has a determining effect on society is a different matter from
saying that society is nothing but its languages and signifying practices. 21

It follows that the meaning produced by the encounter of text and subject cannot
be read off straight from its ‘textual characteristics’ or its discursive strategies.
We also need to take into account what Neale describes as ‘the use to which a
particular text is put, its function within a particular conjuncture, in particular
22
institutional spaces, and in relation to particular audiences’. A text should, also,
not be considered in isolation from the historical conditions of its production and
consumption—its insertion into a context of discourses in struggle, in discursive
formations cohering into different strands of ideology and establishing new
condensations between them (cf. Laclau); also its position in the field of
articulation secured between the discursive and economic/political practices.
Both the text and the subject are constituted in the space of the interdiscursive;
and both are traversed and intersected by contradictory discourses—
contradictions which arise not only from the subject positions which these
different discourses propose, but also from the conjuncture and institutional sites
in which they are articulated and transformed.
The meaning(s) of a text will also be constructed differently depending on the
discourses (knowledges, prejudices, resistances) brought to bear on the text by
the reader. One crucial factor delimiting this will be the repertoire of discourses
at the disposal of different audiences. Willemen notes that